The Postmistress (4 page)

“OH, FOR CHRIST’S
SAKE
.” Frankie Bard leaned back against the chair in the broadcast studio and closed her eyes. “That came off too high, didn’t it?”

Murrow was silent. She opened her eyes.

“Too high and too fast.” She grimaced, agreeing with what he hadn’t said.

“You’ll get it.” He stood up and reached for his hat. “Your type always does—”

She looked up in time to catch the grin. “My type?”

He leaned toward the studio door. “Mix a martini neat as she can shoot a bear—isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.” Frankie stood. “But New York won’t like it.”

He jerked open the studio door. “Hell with New York. You did fine.”

But New York wouldn’t like it one bit. They’d had this same trouble with Betty Wason, in Norway. The door swung slowly closed behind him. A woman’s voice ought not to be telling America about men fighting. It was too high, too thin. It got too excited. For Christ ’s
sake
. Frankie bent and flicked off the microphone. Mr. Paley’s right-hand man refused even to hire women in the CBS top office as secretaries. Hospital junkets, daily life, that sort of thing—the kinds of thing you might hear in the shops—but
for God’s sake
women shouldn’t be reporting the war. Men were over there dying in the skies above London. She pushed the pages of her script together into a neat pile, switched off the light in the studio, and reached for the door. Women really ought to marry and settle down and have babies. Women ought not to walk bareheaded under the German bombs looking for vivid word pictures to paint for the people back home.

So there, she chuckled, and rounded the third set of stairs, climbing her way back up from the underground studio to the street level. She pushed open the heavy back door of Broadcasting House into the blacked-out city waiting for the night’s sirens.

When the bombs started at teatime on the seventh of September, there had been nothing to distinguish that moment as the beginning—there was no way to know what was coming, or why or for how long. War dropped down and settled. Four hundred people died in the first minute of the Blitz. Fourteen hundred were left blown up and bleeding that first night, and now seventeen nights later there was no way to know who was still alive—every night new numbers, and you don’t say, Murrow instructed Frankie, “the streets are rivers of blood. Say that the little policeman you usually say hello to every morning is not there today.”

The new moon had risen over the smoking rooftops, and for a moment one could remember the sky without the bombers and the bright rocketing lines of antiaircraft fire over the chimney pots and the distant medieval spires of Westminster Abbey.

She walked briskly along the shuttered house fronts noting with a reporter’s eye tiny slits of light escaping from some of them. Beyond prayer, beyond chance, for some people lay the simple reward of staying put. Come what may. The moon glinted on the chrome bumpers of the taxis. From the big public shelter along the north side of the street she heard someone singing “Body and Soul,” and the man’s voice in the gray quiet of the moonlit street made it all human. Frankie smiled. War weather.

There was a pattern to the night attacks, the high uneven drone of the Luftwaffe planes rising like a deadly song to a crescendo around midnight. The searchlight shot straight up into the blackness where, singly or in pairs, the German planes flew like shuttlecocks up and back down the river—a relentless rhythm. The incendiaries dropped first, firebombing the darkened city, forcing it alight and ablaze, cutting open a pathway for the others to follow. Those came down screaming, or whistling, the heaviest ones roaring like an express train through a tunnel. Worst of all were the parachute bombs that floated gently, silently down to kill. Frankie turned off Oxford Circus onto the Wilmot Road and began the walk home. Two fire trucks streamed through the emptied streets, racing with their shrouded headlights like blind sirens to the fires. There was heaven, there were the shelters underground, and then here on the street—between the gunners and the gunned—was Middle Earth. In Middle Earth at night, everything was turned upside down in a brilliant kaleidoscope of dizzy bright death set against the black silhouette of London.

A month ago, before the bombs had begun in earnest, Murrow had pulled off a broadcast from five points around London, bringing home the sounds of the bombarded city at night. Frankie had stood with him, watching him poised at the mouth of the bomb shelter down in the crypt of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, moving the microphone cable out of the way of the Londoners as they descended, a courteous escort underground. There had been no way to know whether the Germans would bomb that night, but Murrow concentrated on the steady beat of the people walking in the dark, walking home or down into the shelter, their footsteps sounding like ghosts shod with steel shoes, he said. And when the air raid started, the long swooning climb up the octave in the sky, Murrow’s tense, excited voice narrated the incoming drone of the Luftwaffe, here they come, you can hear them now, and Frankie had felt untouchable then, immortal, holding the microphone up to the night. Here and now. Do you hear this? She wanted to add her voice to Murrow’s, wanted her voice to find the ear of the listeners on the other end of the cable. In that moment, through the air, the Germans plowed straight into an American living room and Frankie was holding the curtain back so they could hear it better, and it was a dare. I dare you, she thought now, to look away.

2.

A
ND WHERE WERE WE LOOKING? Over there. As September passed into October and the bombs worsened, the children of London had been put on buses and trains, and thousands more on ships across the Atlantic. The songs that broke your heart warbled on the airwaves before and after the nighttime news.

We listened to Murrow and Shirer and Sevareid.
This is London,
Murrow paused before launching into last night’s broadcast. “
Tonight, having been thrown against the wall by blasts—which feels like nothing so much as being hit with a feather-covered board—and having lost our third office—which looks like some crazy giant had been operating an eggbeater in its interior—I naturally conclude that the bombing has been heavy.”

Frankie smiled remembering his grin, the weird exhilaration of danger seen and passed by. Not all of them had Murrow’s calm. Though he had covered the fall of France and was no stranger to the war, after three months of the Blitz, Eric Sevareid was heading back to the States. Trying to walk to Broadcasting House to make the night’s broadcast, he’d whispered, “I can’t stand it—when the shrieking starts no matter how sternly I lecture myself, I do the last fifty yards at a dead run.”

“Come on then.” A man ahead of Frankie on the street leaned against the high brick wall behind him, pulling his girl into his lips.

Easy and laughing, the girl wrapped her arms around the man’s neck and pressed herself on him
as though they had all the time in the world and were completely alone
, Frankie began to write in her head. The light was going in the autumn afternoon and the twilight sounds, the endings, lowered all around her in the dark and chill. Across the street in the tiny public garden, a child roared in outrage, “That’s mine, Charlie!”
It is regular life with the lid pried off
—she turned down the street—
and the lid in peacetime is the kettle on to boil, nothing ahead but bedtime, children in their bath, and the supper dishes on the lip of the sink for later
.

She crossed the High Street, heading toward Argyll Road.
It is evening in the upstairs world, the hour before the time to go underground, the last hour of light. Though it is a chilly October evening, everyone is out in it. Good night. Good night, God bless. The bells no longer ring in the churches.
Fifty nights into the bombing, the Germans could be counted on to come, and—though this would never get by the censor—the truth was, the regularity of the bombs, the consistent appearance of the Luftwaffe, was losing the Germans their battle. Because Londoners had realized they could go on. One could plan around the night. At the corner, Mr. Fainsley pulled in his cart and shuttered his plate-glass window—can’t help it, the grocer had shrugged the night before—can’t help closing up the way I always have, though they both knew the window and the shop might be gone in the morning. Can’t help it, she’d heard over and over for the past six weeks with the same wry grin, can’t help going on the way I always do.

One could stand on a corner and see a long row of untouched houses, their white fronts perfectly sharp against the autumn sky—all England in a block—then turn the next corner to find nothing but flat waste and fire, the exhausted faces of the women carrying cheap cardboard suitcases and handing their children up into the refugee buses waiting at the square. Each night of the Blitz, the war passed over London like the Old Testament angel, block by block: touching here, turning from there, and Frankie followed, wanting to get it down, wanting to get at the heart of it.

She rolled her eyes.
The heart of it
would have been redlined without a pause by Max Prescott, her editor at the
New York Trib
. It? What
’
s
it,
Frankie? he would have asked. What’s the story? Where’s the story in
it
? Be the gal who hooks the throat of the world. Not the lip, for God’s sake. The throat. Okay, Boss, she ’d say, smiling at the image she’d called to mind.

A woman heading into the Liverpool Street shelter, carrying her baby and—improbably—the baby’s heavy wooden cradle, looked backward over her shoulder at Frankie as she descended into the dark. Frankie stopped short. Many people went down into the shelters like this, before the sirens sounded, to get a good spot—a corner spot—an elderly woman had explained to Frankie last week, is what you’re after. The woman with her baby looked back at Frankie standing there on the pavement, long enough for Frankie to see the dull blond hair tied back with a black ribbon, and the collar of her sweater sagging slightly where she had lost weight.

And not for the first time, Frankie wished she could return to this spot in the morning to make sure the woman and her baby were rising back up into the day, just to know they had slept and woken and would carry on. Just to know the next part.

The danger all around meant that everyone—Frankie jammed her shoulder against the front door of number 8 Argyll Road—might be living their last days. Everyone’s—she turned her head toward the street as she pushed on the door—might be a heartbreaking story.

“Say, Miss!”

She relaxed her shoulder and straightened up. The boy from the end of the block stood in her walk. “Hello, Billy. What’s cooking?”

He shifted his weight, impatiently, with the wary attention of a six-year-old. “My mum says all Americans have chocolate—but it’s a secret, she says. And we aren’t to ask.”

Frankie nodded. “So you thought you’d get to the bottom of it?”

“That’s right.” He stared back at her.

She wished she had some chocolate to give him. “It is a secret,” Frankie agreed. “Because I haven’t heard anything about it. And I’m in the know.”

He nodded. He knew all about her and the other lady upstairs. From his mum. They were reporters. Come over here to tell all the Americans about what’s what.

“Does that mean
you
don’t have any, then?” he asked, disappointed.

Frankie leaned toward him and put her finger to her lips, a conspirator. “I’ll get on the job,” she said to him, “I promise. If there’s a secret, I’ll find it out. Right?”

“Right,” he breathed, and turned and ran.

She leaned back into the door to shove it open. His father was in the RAF, gone since the summer. His mother—the door gave—couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.

“Harriet?” she called, closing the door to the flat behind her.

“In the bath,” her flatmate shouted.

“Get out, quick. I’ve got news,” Frankie called down the hall, hanging her key on the hook by the door. She unwound her scarf and shoved it into her hat, glad to find Harriet home. One of the stringers for the AP, Harriet Mendelsohn had been in Europe since 1938, and she was good for a laugh or a chat at all hours. She was older than Frankie and deadly earnest about the need for war reporters, people who were hopeful, and indignant, truth seekers.

“It’s not enough to stay home and be a good man. Hurt no one, tell no lies. It’s not enough,” she had said as she clicked her glass against Frankie’s the day Frankie took the room in her flat. “It’s not dirty—but it’s dead.”

There was a letter from Frankie’s mother on the sideboard. She picked it up and slit the envelope open, walking along the tiny passageway into the front room where Harriet had already pulled the blackout curtains on the windows. Frankie flicked on the light by the door and read her letter still on her feet, leaning against the doorjamb. Her mother’s tiny scrawl conveyed all the ordinary news of the house on Washington Square in the past week, and though Frankie loved the familiar slant of her handwriting, her mother was a meticulous accountant of meals eaten, thoughts had, conversations overheard, and she offered all parts of her day as evenly as a mare clopping along a familiar route. Nothing need be hurried, nothing would be missed. And nothing was missed, Frankie would groan to herself, though she read every last word, grudgingly aware that her mother had been a journalist without a paper, or an editor—for years.
I woke on Tuesday to a decidedly dreary day and the only cure for it was two eggs on toast followed by a long walk to the Library. Mrs. Taylor sends her. . . .

“Hullo.” Harriet had come up behind her.

Frankie wheeled, still reading the letter in her hand. “Hello.”